Situational Judgment Tests and their Predictiveness of College Students’ Success: The Influence of Faking

Abstract

There is increasing interest in using situational judgment tests (SJTs) to supplement traditional student admission procedures. An important unexplored issue is whether students can intentionally distort or fake their responses on SJTs. This study examined the fakability of an SJT of college students’ performance. Two hundred ninety-three psychology students completed a cognitive test, a personality measure, and an SJT. Only for the SJT, the students were assigned to either an honest or a fake condition. The scores of students in the fake condition were significantly higher than those of students in the honest condition ( d = .89). Furthermore, faking had a negative effect on the criterion-related validity (there was a significant drop from r = .33 to r = .09) and the incremental validity of the SJT over cognitive ability and personality. These results are discussed in terms of the use of SJTs in high-stakes testing programs.